5 ms·

You can get exposed chip dies on keychains from the intel merch store, which when i worked there i believe was in SC5 building. We had hige prints of the desig

You can get exposed chip dies on keychains from the intel merch store, which when i worked there i believe was in SC5 building. We had hige prints of the designs of many chips on the wall in our lab. They were super cool looking. I always regretted not taking some home. Before multi-cores existed, i recall asking some colleagues there, “why cant we just stack multiple cpus on top of eachother?”

rwmj 6y ago
> Before multi-cores existed, i recall asking some colleagues there, “why cant we just stack multiple cpus on top of eachother?” I guess you know this already, but the answer is you were right. You can, but heat dissipation is a real problem. The technique is called 3D ICs. https://semiengineering.com/stacked-die-changes/ https://semiengineering.com/stacked-die-changes/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-dimensional_integrated_circuit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-dimensional_integrated_c...
- samstave 6y ago
  Yeah - basically, a (like a couple years, that first comment was made in ~1998) while after that comment I went on a hike with a guy in research and we were talking about then secret research that was happening - and he stated they had a 64 core version (yes, 64 cores - but I do not know how functional this test chip was - just that the number of cores was 64) on a test chip that could function. This was in ~2002 or so? I cant recall. But the compute power was low - it was more about the interconnects, IIRC? Anyway -- I ran the gaming lab and was responsible for testing games with SIMD instruction optimizations against games on the first celeron and pentium based CPUS to determine if they passed a subjective muster, as intel would give a company $1MM in marketing funding if they advertised their games as being opt for intel procs... My greatest claims from intel was: I never once sat in my cube. I had the same pee schedule as Andy Grove and for some reason, like every single time I went pee... he was there also and we peed "together" The most I ever said to the Titan was "Hi How Are You" GOTO 10 "Oh Shit, He Is Here Again"

rwmj 6y ago

> Before multi-cores existed, i recall asking some colleagues there, “why cant we just stack multiple cpus on top of eachother?” I guess you know this already, but the answer is you were right. You can, but heat dissipation is a real problem. The technique is called 3D ICs. https://semiengineering.com/stacked-die-changes/ https://semiengineering.com/stacked-die-changes/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-dimensional_integrated_circuit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-dimensional_integrated_c...

samstave 6y ago
Yeah - basically, a (like a couple years, that first comment was made in ~1998) while after that comment I went on a hike with a guy in research and we were talking about then secret research that was happening - and he stated they had a 64 core version (yes, 64 cores - but I do not know how functional this test chip was - just that the number of cores was 64) on a test chip that could function. This was in ~2002 or so? I cant recall. But the compute power was low - it was more about the interconnects, IIRC? Anyway -- I ran the gaming lab and was responsible for testing games with SIMD instruction optimizations against games on the first celeron and pentium based CPUS to determine if they passed a subjective muster, as intel would give a company $1MM in marketing funding if they advertised their games as being opt for intel procs... My greatest claims from intel was: I never once sat in my cube. I had the same pee schedule as Andy Grove and for some reason, like every single time I went pee... he was there also and we peed "together" The most I ever said to the Titan was "Hi How Are You" GOTO 10 "Oh Shit, He Is Here Again"